What would happen if the Sun simply disappeared? Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has answered that question in blunt terms, and the short version is that we would have a few minutes of normality before everything went wrong. His explanation comes from his Amazon Prime series "Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains Everything".
The scenario is purely theoretical, though it echoes what could one day happen when our star runs out of fuel and reaches the end of its current life cycle. Tyson calls it one of the fun questions in astronomy: asking what would happen if something impossible happened.
Eight minutes of blissful ignorance
Speaking in 2015, Tyson said that if the Sun vanished in an instant, "we would not know anything about that fact for eight minutes and 20 seconds." The reason is the distance. Sunlight takes that long to reach us, so the light already on its way would keep arriving.
During that window, Earth would carry on as if nothing had changed. "We would still orbit the Sun, we would still feel its light," he explained.
Cold, darkness and a slow end
Once the window closed, Tyson said, "we plunge into depths of cold and we have nothing to orbit any more and we fly off at a tangent into interplanetary space." Life on the surface would die pretty quickly.
The key problem is photosynthesis, which forms the base of the food chain. Without it, animals that eat plants would die, and animals that eat other animals would eventually follow. Tyson did point to one possible exception. Microbes at the bottom of the ocean might do just fine, because they live on geochemical energy rather than solar energy.
Humans, however, are not microbes. Tyson said how long people lasted would depend on how much canned food and how many blankets they had stored. He described it as a slow exhaustion of the total food available, including the rice and wheat already harvested and sitting in silos. "Eventually the last person on Earth will die," he said.
A very different kind of danger
In the same episode, Tyson turned to another cosmic threat: a black hole passing close to Earth. He described a person being pulled apart by tidal forces, with the body snapping into two pieces, most likely at the base of the spine.
Strangely, he said, you would survive that first break. Below the waist there are important organs, but no vital ones. The torso would stay alive for a little while, until the person bled to death, though he noted it all happens much faster than that sounds.
The two sections would then keep being stretched. They would fracture again into eight pieces, then 16, until eventually all that was left was the head and multiple other parts.
How things stand now
Neither event is expected anytime soon. The Sun is still burning, and no black hole is heading our way. Tyson’s explanations are thought experiments, designed to show how the laws of physics would play out if the impossible happened. For now, they serve as a vivid reminder of how much life on Earth depends on a star that is eight minutes and 20 seconds away.
Image credit: AMAZON
Source: The Mirror US
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